Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)

Interactions between commoners and elites is a poorly addressed area of study in the Maya region. Various excavations of ancient Maya palace structures and royal tombs, epigraphic studies of Maya hieroglyphs, and iconographic analyses of ancient Maya art have revealed a copious amount of information about ancient Maya elite. Similarly, excavations of ancient Maya commoner households and burials have revealed a great deal of information about ancient Maya commoners. However, there are...

The ancient Maya site of Pacbitun is centrally located between the major ecozones of the Belize River Valley and the Mountain Pine Ridge of West-Central Belize. Investigations in 2012 and 2013 began on a group of mounds, known as the Tzib Group, located outside of the core zone of Pacbitun in order to investigate what is now believed to be a ground stone tool workshop. The workshop produced grinding implements made from granite. Excavations in 2014 into the main mound of the group uncovered more...

Activities of all actors should be considered collectively given that communities were likely forged through a negotiation of needs and wants from the perspectives of rulers and subjects. Successful elite institutions would need to closely monitor these negotiations. If the needs of the general public were not met, elite institutions could be undermined. During the Terminal Preclassic, Ucanha, a secondary center connected to other monumental centers via an 18-km long causeway in the Northern...

The physical remains of ancient buildings and activity areas provide an important archaeological window into the lives and practices of past households. In the Maya region, patio groups composed of multiple structures housing extended families have long been recognized as the fundamental units of settlement. At a very basic level, patio groups were both the primary locus and one of the most tangible material outcomes of household activities. Variations in their size and spatial configuration can...

Between 2011 and 2014, the BVAR Project focused considerable attention on the excavation and preservation of the site’s Eastern Triadic Shrine (a.k.a E-Group). In addition to revealing important information on the evolution of the architectural complex, our investigations also uncovered a series of burials that span from the Preclassic to the Terminal Classic periods. The burials, particularly those discovered in Structure B1, the central structure of the eastern triadic complex, reflect...

Resource procurement is a topic traditionally approached from a geographic macro scale. In the Maya area, this refers to the scale of settlement patterns or the landscape, involving the territory inhabited by a large number of people living in different settlements. What this scale often misses is the role that commoner households play in these processes. This presentation will discuss how geographic setting and access to resources not only shaped the daily lives of Maya commoners but the role...

Xunantunich Group D, an elite residential unit, has a fascinating history of construction and reuse between two temporally separated occupations. The group is set apart from other Xunantunich residential units by a sacbe connecting it to the site core and a large ancestor shrine acting as the architectural focal point of the group. The past three years of research at Group D has focused on the Late Classic ancestor shrine and the open courtyard directly in front of the structure with the goal of...